| Summary: | Both literary and historical studies have recently experienced a “temporal turn,” in which the cultural history of time has become an object of scholarly investigation. The “big history” has encouraged us to think about time on a longer scale, situating historical periods within extended arcs of centuries and human activity as a whole within millennia of natural history. But this turn to a deeper and vaster sense of historical time has, itself, a history, one that illuminates our current struggle to define the scale within which we understand human experience. At the great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century, from the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia to the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, visitors encountered representations of vast historical time in which humanity played a relatively insignificant role. The expositions seemed to tell a tale of historical change in which human beings became Malthusian populations, giving way in a quasi-evolutionary fashion before fetishized machinery and clockwork technology. The expositions and related cultural artifacts such as monumental clocks, literary narratives and sketches, and historical paintings thus presage, in their imaginings of inhuman time, not only the contemporary academic interest in “big history” and “deep time,” but also such cultural phenomena as the Clock of the Long Now, whose builders (engineers and technophiles associated with the computer industry in California) envision a clock so slow it would tell time into a future devoid of humanity. Thus, “deep time” becomes the fantasy of a world other than that made by human beings.
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